The Decade in Review

What Happened to Me in the Dark: 2000-2009

What a decade! I managed to work as a film critic for the entire
decade for about a dozen different newspapers and websites, sometimes
fully employed, and sometimes not. I estimate that I saw somewhere
between 2500 and 3000 new movies this decade. Even more memorably, my
son was born this decade, and I hope to see thousands more movies with
him. The following were my favorites from 2000 to 2009, sticking to only
one entry per director.

10. The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker does something that all the
other Iraq war movies fail to do. It considers the dangerous idea that, indeed, war can
be fun. The movie is a good deal closer in spirit to the action-oriented
war movies of the 1940s and 1950s, with their gung-ho attitude and
intense male bonding; films of the kind that Samuel Fuller and Don
Siegel used to make. (And make no mistake: Kathryn Bigelow is one of the
finest living directors of male-bonding genre films.)
It did not have an agenda and did not preach to me. It did that rarest
of rare things in American movies: it allowed me to form my own ideas.
It's a simple, straightforward presentation, but in nearly every shot
comes an odd duality: this sucks, and this is cool.

9. Before Sunset
Lean and light and almost rushed, but intelligent and bittersweet,
Richard Linklater's grown-up sequel to his dream-of-youth original
Before Sunrise (1995) had even more on the line emotionally, in
an even more direct manner. In Before Sunset, the two would-be lovers (Ethan Hawke and
Julie Delpy) have so much more to share this time, and --
heartbreakingly -- less time to share it in. That ending, with those
last two lines of dialogue, deserves a place in the history of great
endings.

8. Goodbye Dragon Inn
The "Taiwanese New Wave" of the 1990s more or less petered out in the
2000s, though Tsai Ming-liang kept the torch burning with a series of
increasingly quirky, almost totally deadpan comedies. My favorite is
this underappreciated tribute to cinema. Goodbye Dragon Inn takes place on the last day
of a dilapidated movie theater, showing King Hu's Dragon Inn
(1967), while the rain pours outside and drips in through various cracks
and crevices. The ticket girl has a crush on the projectionist, and
various other little dramas play out as patrons very nearly connect, but
eventually go their separate ways. Tsai creates a perfect physical space
for this disconnect, damp and a little cramped, and very rarely ventures
outside. And I would wager that less than 100 words are spoken
throughout, but the weird proceedings add up to a very real sense of
beautiful sadness.

7. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The revival of the Western genre in the 2000s thrilled me to no end,
from gems like Open Range and 3:10 to Yuma to this masterpiece. Brad
Pitt gives a canny performance as a Jesse James who uses his presence
and reputation to control a room. Perhaps even better is Casey Affleck's
squirrelly, affecting performance as Robert Ford, whose life must go on
after James's has ended. Director Andrew Dominik -- only on his second
film -- wraps up the entirety of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in a truly breathtaking mix of
myth and space and poetry.

6. Inland Empire
The general critical consensus is that David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is the
movie of the decade, and I can't disagree too much. I love it also and I
went back and forth as to whether to choose it or Inland Empire for my
list (I'm sticking to a one-film-per-director rule). Eventually I went
with this one because it's a bit more unhinged and deranged -- a
companion piece to Eraserhead -- but it also feels more like a complete
piece, a farewell and a fuck-you to traditional Hollywood filmmaking.

5. Spider
David Cronenberg made three superior films in the 2000s, each a good
many miles away from his body conscious horror films of the 1970s and
1980s. His Viggo Mortensen gangster films (A History of Violence
and Eastern Promises) earned more attention than did this daring,
creepy little character study about a mumbling, shuffling half-being
known as Spider (a superb Ralph Fiennes). But Spider was a dive into an
uncomfortable, but mesmerizing place.

4. Werckmeister Harmonies
Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr made arthouse waves in the 1990s with his
seven-hour masterpiece Satantango, though the far more
manageable, 2-1/2 hour Werckmeister Harmonies is just as great. Tarr passes much of the
time simply tracking behind the actors as they walk, accompanied only by
the sound of crunching gravel. But at the same time, he conjures up
images so gorgeous and startling that they could almost make your heart
skip a beat: Janos Valuska (Lars Rudolph) describing the movements of
the solar system to a bar full of drunken reprobates, or the first view
of a captured whale, seen only dimly from the darkened inside of a giant
trailer.

3. Ghost World
Here's Scarlett Johansson, for the first of two times in my top three. I
love her performance as Rebecca in Ghost World, the more mature of the two friends
and the one who is starting to lose interest in all those cynical quips
and all that ironic behavior that her friend Enid (Thora Birch) can't
seem to give up. In other words, this is a beautiful, immensely
personal work from director Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes,
including a beefed-up character -- Steve Buscemi's Seymour -- to
represent Zwigoff himself, but it's all still grounded in a unique sense
of life and truth.

2. Lost in Translation
Does Sofia Coppola's magical movie need praising or defending? I think
the majority still likes it, but there are a few sour apples who
complain bitterly about its misrepresentation of Japan and other
quibbles. The reason Japan is misrepresented is because it is seen
through the eyes of two different Americans (note how these views differ
between their personalities). That's what the title means, too. But if
I'm going to praise Lost in Translation, I'll just say that Bill Murray gives a comedic
performance for the ages, that Scarlett Johansson perfectly matches him,
that it's one of the most beautifully delicate films ever produced in
Hollywood, and that it's a bittersweet comedy worthy of Chaplin.

1. Yi Yi
This was the seventh feature film by Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang,
and his first to be distributed in the United States. Sadly, it was also
his last film, as he passed away in 2007 at the age of 59. Yi Yi --
subtitled "A One and a Two" -- struck me as a classic even as I watched
it early in 2001. I watched it again a few weeks ago just to make sure,
and it struck me the same way. Its most miraculous achievement is that
it seems warmly humanistic and rigorously artistic at the same time.
(Usually directors fall in either one camp or the other.) Structurally,
it's a bit like The Godfather (without the killings) or like Bergman's
Fanny and Alexander, a sprawling family epic, in which we observe
several members of one very universal family, but we also view them
through long hallways or door frames or windows; Yang constantly reminds
us that we're just watching and we may never truly know them. The most
revealing character is the little boy Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), who
likes to photograph the backs of people's heads so that they can see
what they truly look like; that's a bit of poetry for the ages if I ever
saw it.

Nick Schager 1. The New World
2. Mulholland Dr.
3. Zodiac
4. There Will Be Blood
5. Trouble Every Day
6. In the Mood for Love
7. Three Times
8. Femme Fatale
9. The Royal Tenenbaums
10. Memories of Murder

Chuck Stephens
Goodbye Dragon Inn
House of 1000 Corpses
In the City of Sylvia
In the Mood for Love
Memories of Murder
Millennium Mambo
Mulholland Drive
Team America: World Police
Tropical Malady
Unknown Pleasures